I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for supporting location for a home base station in a wireless network.
II. Background
Home base stations are base stations designed to serve relatively small geographic areas and are widely deployed at various locations such as homes, offices, shops, apartments, etc. These home base stations are often used to improve radio coverage, increase throughput, reduce load on macro-cellular networks, and/or provide other benefits for network operators and/or users. Unlike macro base stations that are carefully deployed at specific locations and maintained by network operators, home base stations may be flexibly deployed in an unplanned manner at any location by users but typically use licensed radio frequencies of the network operators.
A home base station may support communication for one or more User Equipments (UEs) within its coverage. It may be desirable to know the location of the home base station and/or a UE communicating with the home base station. For example, it may be necessary to know the location of the home base station in order to ensure that it is authorized to operate at its current location (e.g., is within a geographic area for which an associated network operator has a license to use the radio frequencies supported by the home base station). As another example, a user of a UE may place an emergency call using the home base station. The location of the UE may then be determined and used to send emergency assistance to the user. There are many other scenarios in which knowledge of the location of the home base station and/or the UE may be useful or necessary.
A home base station is typically installed indoors and may be located deep inside a building or underground. Hence, determining the location of the home base station or of a UE accessing the home base station may be problematic, e.g., subject to failure or inaccuracy. There may thus be a premium on methods that can reliably and accurately locate the home base station and/or the UE accessing the home base station.